


Aschenregen

by seeratte



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, LGBTQ+ Friendly, Multi, Not Grimdark, War, bc i need some fluff to lighten the dark, cw anxiety, cw depression, idk how this page works help, it actually has some romance though it's not a big part, there's a lot of snow at one point
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-12 22:06:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19238020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeratte/pseuds/seeratte
Summary: Linus couldn't have prevented the war even if he had been aware of the danger at the time, and now it's too late to regret it. Too late for hope, too late for a future. Linus can only let himself be carried away by the current and hope to neither freeze to death nor be pulled down by the swell.





	1. A Night at Sea I

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Aschenregen](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/490882) by seeratte. 



> Hey there! This may not be my first work of prose. This IS, however, my first work of prose I'm translating into English. I'm trying my best in regards of that, I just wanted to let you know that it may contain some stupid mistakes made out of not knowing it better. My high school teacher was a failure. I learned English because I had to woo over anime on deviantart and translated Linkin Park lyrics. 
> 
> However. I hope you like it! It's long and it may be about war, but mostly it's about the characters. I'm trying my best to not make the average fantasy out of it.

While Linus Färber was checking the rigging on the jib boom, he watched the town hall explode on the opposite bank. As the rope slipped out of his hand - his mouth wide open – the detonation wave should have already capsized the small fishing cutter, something an ordinary explosion wouldn't have been capable of. But shape and colour were clearly visible even in the dark of night, indicating that it had possessed a magical amplifier. Linus didn't know how they worked though, he just knew well about the power of their detonation waves.  
However, the wave did not reach them. It deflagrated shortly before the border of the continents. The fishing boat swayed in the silence of the calm sea, just as before.  
Unbelievingly, Linus stared straight ahead into the city of Sysdale and watched as its center burned. Houses had collapsed, blazing flames rising from them.  
"Fate almighty." Kaspar Schuchard appeared on deck and Linus looked at him rubbing his forehead. Sweat beads had formed on it - Schuchard always sweated very quickly - and the fire of Sysdale was mirrored in them.  
Linus' other colleagues had also looked up, the two women Falk and Frieda had interrupted their task of stowing the nets. A moment of silence moved in, on all eight meters from the bow to the stern.  
"What about Bosch? Where's the captain?” Linus asked himself, but said nothing.  
"What was that?" Schuchard looked back and forth with his eyebrows pulled together.  
"Fire, as you can see." Falk sighed loudly before she resumed her work.  
"No, no." The young man waved his hands. "No, that's not what I meant. What was that?"  
Falk did not react any further. Linus was still silent. His gaze hung on the fire that blazed up to the dark night sky as well as the black smoke. The detonation wave had caught ships near the harbour, knocked them over. He could hear the cries of people. It was cold that night from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of January 6399. Nothing seemed real.  
"We should do something, they'll die in the cold." Frieda looked around worried. Where was the captain?  
"That's Hostis, that's none of our business." Falk looked up again. "Besides, we are not allowed to go there anyway - anyone got a clue what that was?"  
"Fire,” Schuchard said.  
"That's not what I asked, moron." She nodded towards Sysdale. "Why didn't the wave catch us? Linus, was that you? Can't you do stuff like that?"  
Linus' briefly glanced to her. She meant the barrier that had saved them from the blast wave, the magical blockade of a protection spell. He shook his head. No, he hadn't. Instead, he nodded in the direction from which he suspected the cause.  
Linus was used words like these from Falk - she didn't like Hostis and any attempts to talk her out of her prejudices had failed. He did not interfere though, but Schuchard once tried. He had relatives on the northern continent, though not in Sysdale. It had been a long fight and in the end Captain Bosch had had to intervene and almost fired them.  
But even Falk couldn't deny that she owed her life to a hostic border ship. With its three masts, it was one of the larger ones. Since the hostic economic crisis fifteen years ago, the number of illegal immigrants from north to west had risen enormously, especially here, between Sysdale and Hohendamm, and the number of border guards had tripled since then. Three-masted border ships were large border ships, but by no means a rarity. The iron hull reflected the burning port. Wind was blowing, even if it wasn't very strong. Two of the big sails had been pulled in.  
In any case Linus was not sure if they were allowed to help the people in the water on the other side of the border. Buoys marked it in the water and he had thought all night long that they had been too close to them.  
Falk was not enthusiastic about it, not at all. She distorted her face so that the bridge of her nose became wrinkled. "Schuchard, go wake up Bosch. I think we need him now."  
Linus began to reattach the rigging with crystallizing breath. His fingers trembled. It wasn't due to the cold.  
Another border ship was in visual contact. This one was a bit further away, had one mast less than the other, and above all, had already turned towards the harbour. The closer one however, was heading exactly towards the small fishing boat.  
Linus had never in his life come into direct contact with the hostic military, not even with their navy. One might think this would not be too surprising, since Hostis was not his homeland and he actually never had entered it. Statistically however, Hohendamm - his hometown and current place of residence - was the tribunic city with the highest contingent of foreign military. The people talked a lot, they cursed a lot, also about the foreign military, on soldiers as well as officers. Hostis was to stay away. If the northern continent did not want to unite with the others to form the Union, then it should have nothing to do with them either. Those who demanded to be left alone should also leave the others alone. People talked a lot, they cursed a lot. In this area it was no different than in the rest of the world.  
A light was fired from the quarterdeck of the border ship. A signal spell, low, shining blue. Another one. Linus could not exactly read the message, even though the shapes were clear and definitely not made by an intern like himself. But Falk was able to decipher it very well and rushed to the helm to decide what to do in the captain's absence.  
"Never thought I'd experience something like this," she groaned as she turned in to steer the ship across the border. Blue as a colour was not an order, but it was also no help, no warning. A request. Linus could well imagine what it was referring to.


	2. A Night at Sea II

"Fate almighty," Linus heard again, this time from Captain Bosch himself. He appeared on deck after opening the hatch to the cargo hold, rubbed his eyes and stared intensely at Sysdale. "And I thought they had set off fireworks to celebrate the conferences, what's going on over there?" He was quiet for a moment, scratching his head. His gaze turned to the border ship of the hostic navy and his facial expression froze. "Sadnaval have mercy. The conferences!"  
Linus hadn't thought about it either. Instead, he had completely ignored it, even though the news hadn't turned on much else in the last few days. It just didn't interest him. The conferences took place on another continent which - although visible from Hohendamm in almost all weather conditions - was in a completely different world. A strange, cold one. The nordic world of ice and snow.  
He wasn't interested in politics, so he didn't know exactly what kind of event the conferences in Sysdale were. But he had also noticed that the Czar and his wife were present in person, which was why the military contingent in the area had been so high in the last few weeks, even higher than usually.  
From Frieda, Linus heard a frightened inhalation sound and watched from the corner of his eye how she held her hands in front of her mouth. Schuchard understood nothing at all, as always, but tried not to let it show. He failed.  
No one in the whole world, no one in Miseria, needed more friction between the North and the West at the moment, but whoever was responsible for this explosion seemed to have a different opinion. Surely they had their reasons and although Linus respected every opinion and easily considered them justified to exist, he came to the conclusion that night that igniting a bomb in a big city was a terrible opinion.  
It didn't take long and they laid flank to flank with the border ship. After close communication between them both, a man stood on deck, who was apparently the captain of the border guards, on the same spot where Linus had worked when the explosion happened.  
"Thank you so much for responding to my request, Captain Bosch," the man said, whose hostic accent was less harsh than expected.   
"It's my honor, Sir..." Bosch squinted his eyes to read what was written on the military uniform, "Captain Lieutenant Frederik." He smiled briefly. It was a lie. Bosch probably liked Hostis and its military even less than Falk.  
One of the senior officers - he would have been a Captain at land. But here he was Lieutenant Captain and wore the uniform of the navy, which could easily be distinguished from the land by the reversed colours. Mainly white, just a little of the otherwise so dominant dark grey-green at the edges. Only the thick, golden buttons were the same, as was the cross on the upper sleeves underlaid with a split fir, the sign of the hostic military. His name tag was barely readable in the bad light, but the embroidered clan symbol of the Täysikuu underneath it was well visible. Lieutenant Captain Frederik Täysikuu belonged to a mage clan of ice benders from southern Hostis.  
"What has happened?" Bosch inquired.  
Lieutenant Captain Frederik crossed his arms, his gaze wandering to the city. "We don't know, our connection is blocked.”  
"And you're dealing with us?"  
The man smiled briefly and embittered. "We have enough people stationed in the city. We have to help the people here and I give you the permission to support us."  
Bosch put his head crooked and Linus looked away. He could feel his heart beating, unpleasantly loud. The water was freezing cold. Bosch shouldn't show in front of such a high-ranking man how little he could stand Hostis, it was the wrong moment for hostilities like that.  
"In an event like this, you relax the border regulations?"  
Linus would have liked to bury his face in his hands. He caught a glimpse of his captain's gloomy face.  
"The water has four degrees." Sir Frederik seemed unimpressed. "If you want to help, you should forget where these people come from." He stepped back to the railing. "Get them out of the water and bring them to us, we'll take them back to the other side."  
Then he climbed up the rope ladder that led to his ship and immediately disappeared out of sight. The ladder was caught.  
It wasn't the first time Linus had seen a mage. He himself also belonged to a clan, even though his magical abilities were only just enough to give him the clan name "Färber". However, this was the first time he had dealt directly with a battle mage, a mage of the military. Although they were not allowed to have official military ranks in Tribunus, his homeland, they had some battle mages themselves, more than Hostis had in total. Linus had little to do with them, the so-called Grandmasters. If his abilities had been better trained, then he would have perhaps been sent into military training, but that was not the case. So he was just a simple almost seventeen-year-old who had finished school half a year ago and had been too much of a mess to get a place at a university, so that his mother had gotten him an internship on this fishing trawler out of despair. He wanted to be grateful for it, but he couldn't.  
Immediately afterwards, starboard was turned to detach the trawler from the border ship, then portside to cross the border. Linus' gaze hung on the bright orange buoy in the water. He had never been to Hostis before. Neither on the mainland nor on the Iliarys, the large archipelago just outside his front door on which Sysdale laid. It was exhausting to get a visa.  
Bosch grumbled after instructing Frieda and Linus to light all the lamps. Meanwhile Falk was still holding the wheel and Schuchard was controlling the rigging.  
“Pompous mages,” he heard Bosch swear. Linus didn't like Bosch's outbursts, but heard them rather here than directly in front of the mage. "Forget where people come from, yes, of course, that's why you're locking them up in your own country." Bosch distanced himself from Linus so that he could no longer understand his angry mumbling. "If you bring people in here, make sure the boat isn't too full, I don't want to capsize or throw cargo overboard." With those words he disappeared below deck again.


End file.
